Can 20 per cent of schoolchildren really have special needs?

The £5 billion budget for pupils with learning difficulties is rising fast –
but is the money being used to cope with a new tide of poor parenting and
failed teaching?

Summer-born children being wrongly classed as having special needsPhoto: ALAMY

By Peter Stanford

7:30AM BST 12 May 2012

The primary school was in Surrey, the head teacher recalls, but its catchment area was far removed from the affluent image enjoyed by much of the county. Among the four-year-olds joining the reception class, she had several who had not been toilet-trained. She put it down to inadequate parenting and sent them home until they had learnt to use a lavatory. “I’m not a social worker,” she told their families. They, however, kicked up a fuss, so she turned to the local education authority for support. Their suggestion was that she place the children on the special educational needs (SEN) register.

This long-serving head – who has subsequently moved to another school and prefers to remain anonymous – understands why the Government announced in the Queen’s Speech that they were undertaking the “biggest overhaul of SEN provision in 30 years”. Her experience goes to the heart of concerns that have grown up around the £5 billion annual budget the Department for Education spends on SEN – a budget that is currently growing at a rate that outstrips inflation, officials say.

Many experts fear that funds earmarked to help children with learning difficulties are being redirected to cope with a new tide of social deprivation that is washing up in the classroom. Children from troubled homes, who turn up at schools with behavioural problems, are being routinely put on the SEN register alongside those with more specific learning difficulties, such as dyslexia and dyspraxia.

It is a picture apparently borne out by official figures, which show that affluent Richmond upon Thames in west London has 11.8 per cent of primary pupils on the SEN register. In Liverpool, with its higher levels of unemployment and poverty, that figure is 22.6 per cent. So are SEN, and the vast resources that accompany it, being used as an excuse for poor parenting?

The current SEN system was established in 1981, after a report by Mary Warnock, with the aim of including in mainstream schools children with learning difficulties who had been previously educated in separate establishments. Three decades on, there are more than one in five schoolchildren in England on the SEN register – more than half of all pupils in 100 schools.

Some argue that the schools are to blame for these high numbers. Jean Gross, a former government adviser on children with speech, language and communication needs, complains that some schools use the SEN register “as an explanation of failure”. Teachers label a child as having special needs to explain why they haven’t thrived in their care.

Ofsted has reinforced her concern. In a 2010 report, the schools’ inspectorate estimated that as many as half of children in some of the categories on the SEN register had been misdiagnosed. “Higher expectations of all children, and better teaching and learning, would lead to fewer children being identified as having special educational needs,” it said.

Then there is the issue of money. Because schools receive extra payments when they have pupils on the SEN register, there may be a financial motivation in these times of frozen school budgets behind labelling more children as having learning difficulties. Of the three levels of need on the register, the first two – School Action, and School Action Plus, which both require additional input in terms of teacher time and materials – can be diagnosed by teachers on the spot without independent verification, an act which then turns on the tap of additional funds.

Most schools, though, reject this charge, claiming that the paperwork required is daunting, and any extra money they might get is marginal. It is only, they say, if children are put on the top level of the register and receive a statement of educational needs that significant sums of money are involved. This stage is reached when School Action and School Action Plus are judged to have failed to help the child keep up with their peers. It requires a lengthy statutory assessment by an outside panel of experts, including educational psychologists and social services, and takes a minimum of six months, often as long as three years.

If successful, it means that a sum of money – which can be around £20,000 a year – is set aside by the local education authority to meet that child’s diagnosed needs. It can be spent either on additional one-to-one resources in the classroom – such as the provision of a designated learning assistant (though recent research by London University’s Institute for Education cast doubt on the effectiveness of this particular method of support) – or on the cost of a place at a specialist school.

Such significant sums of public money inevitably invite greater scrutiny. Anecdotal evidence is that the first instinct of many cash‑strapped local authorities is to refuse even to assess a child for a statement, leaving only those with the sharpest elbows standing.

“I was told that my son would never get a statement,” says Tania Tirraoro, the mother of two boys with Asperger’s syndrome, “because he was very bright, even though at our local primary he sat under the table and couldn’t make friends. And he was initially turned down for assessment. I had to fight. That seems to be a pattern. Local authorities turn everyone down and hope that at least half will give up and go away.”

That is the tale of woe told by many of the Special Needs Jungle website Tirraoro runs as a resource for parents. It directs them to lawyers who specialise in fighting local authority refusals to statement. Those who do battle it out, Tirraoro suggests, are predominantly middle-class. “They are more likely to have the time to fill in endless paperwork, the knowledge of how the system works, access to research, and the financial resources to fight”. One of the proposed reforms in the Queen’s Speech is a simplified approach to assessing children.

Tirraoro, from Farnham in Surrey, also believes that better-informed parents may explain the current strains on the SEN system. “Mothers and fathers today don’t just accept it when teachers tell them their child is naughty. With my sons, I gave up my career as a television journalist so I could be at their primary school as a helper to see what was happening and make sure it was addressed.”

Both her boys now have the funding that enables them to go to a local private school that specialises in working with children with special educational needs. However, overall the number of children with such provisions is falling slightly – from 3 to 2.7 per cent between 2003 and 2010 – partly, parents suggest, because of local authority reluctance to “statement” children because of the cost. In 2005, Baroness Warnock publicly disowned the system she had helped create, and criticised statements in particular as turning children’s education into “a battle for resources”.

However, Jacqueline Murray, head teacher of Fairley House, a London school for those diagnosed with specific learning difficulties, feels that trying to draw clear distinctions between why different groups of children are on the SEN register is far from straightforward. “If you take dyslexia as an example of a specific learning difficulty, does it matter if a child finds reading challenging because of dyslexia or because his parents haven’t ever shown him a book or read to him? The effect is still the same. He needs extra support with reading.”

But why, if numbers of statements are falling, does the money spent on the system continue to rise? It may be that larger awards are made to the determined few who do fight their way through. And it may be because numbers on School Action and School Action Plus – diagnosed on the spot by teachers, remember – are rising – from 14 to 18.2 per cent of pupils from 2003 to 2010.

No one seems clear about what is going on, least of all anyone at the Department for Education. But on one thing all can surely agree: spending taxpayers’ money on toilet-training children is hardly what SEN was intended for.